The use of solid state detectors for the detection of ionizing radiation is well known. Furthermore, the use of a mosaic of groups of detector electrodes on a single substrate of material such as CdZnTe has been mooted.
However, the application of such a matrix in a practical gamma camera is nearly obviated by the lack of a suitable fast readout system capable of reading out individual counts from the very large array of detector electrodes desirable for such a camera.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,672,207 describes a readout system for a mosaic of NXM scintillator/photodetector elements. In this system the photodetectors feed row and column amplifiers which indicate, for signals having the proper pulse height, that an event has occurred in the nth row and the mth column of the mosaic. However, this system requires a large number of scintillator crystals and, if applied to the solid state CdZnTe camera, as postulated above, would be unable to discriminate events which occur near or at the boundary between elements or to discriminate events which result in Compton scattering events.
In published PCT Application WO 95/33332 a method of reading out a matrix is described in which charge, generated as a result of events at points in the matrix, is stored at those points and the entire matrix is read out seriatim. This method, although mooted as being useful for a gamma camera utilizing CdZnTe, CdTe or a number of other materials at pages 45-48, is not capable of distinguishing individual events which would be necessary for the energy discrimination of events, used, for example, to eliminate events caused by Compton scattering.